Showrooms and House of the Immidate Future

Attending showrooms was one important aspect of the study tour in Seattle, we had the opportunity to attend many including Knoll. Here we met the representative of Knoll and had some time to sketch furniture in the showroom. We also visited the House of the Immediate Future, which was designed with sustainability in mind.

During the Knoll visit, I learned a lot of office design, specially furniture and textiles. Knoll has great desks chairs which allow for comfort in the work place, which nowadays is more open and cooperative; hence furniture is designed around these specific needs. Walls are lower to allow communication in the work space, and storage space is maximized.

  These are some of the sketches in Knoll showroom.

One of the many visits in our study tour was the House of the Immediate Future. A prototype house honoring the 50^th Anniversary of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, which commemorates the houses of the future, latest technology.  This house is a display to showcase the work and passion that goes into building these houses as well as the energy-efficient aspects of the prototype home. One very interesting feature in this particular house is the “Wet Block,” a yellow block in the middle of the structure, where all the plumbing, and wet aspects of the house, connect to. This is very efficient as well as the thick walls filled with insulation to keep cold air entering the house. Big windows that run all the way to the floor allow natural light to come in the space, maximizing natural light and minimizing the use of artificial lighting.

House of the Immediate Future Exterior

This sketch shows the House of the Immediate Future's exterior, just behind the samller house, horizontal lines that go from top to battom of the side of the house can be appreciated, this is the Wet Block I mentioned earlier.

House of the Immediate Future Kitchen

This is the kitchen in the house; here once again we appreciate the yellow wall, the Wet Block. I like the white cabinetry it is very clean and interesting. The window right next to the kitchen allows a great quantity of natural light to come into the house, as well as the other windows in the hallway to the left. Do to the width and thickness of the window this could work as a sitting area or storage.

Urban Sketchers/Seattle

During the Seattle study tour, we had the opportunity to sketch with Seattle’s urban sketchers at Seattle’s sculpture park. This opportunity allowed me to keep improving my sketching skills from live which can be a little tricky for me, and what best way to keep learning then to have the urban sketchers around us. I spoke to one of them, and her sketches were amazing, as I approached her in astonishment, she kindly told me that all it take is practice and learning to see things around us, which after analyzing made me realize this is very true. When sketching, we need to observe and record what we see, hence learning to see the world around us, this means noticing shapes, color, shadows, surroundings, texture, little things that we take for granted.

This is my sketch at the sculpture park, and i have to say that I am very proud of it, as one of the sketchers told me is all about learning how to see things, and I payed attention to my surroundings, then I reallized that the building windows reflect other structures.

 

This is the view I sketched from live in the Sculpture Park,. People kept moving around, and that is why I did not draw them in my final sketch.